The Great Being

I'm back to reading philosophy and the discussions about consciousness being an "emergent" property, something that naturally lies above the hum-drum of cellular interactions, like a face inherently "emerges" from patterns of paint in a portrait, inspired me to wonder about the implications.

As a human being we think of ourselves as one being. What is oneness? A feeling of control and influence and feedback. Oneness is communication, and self-awareness. We know what constitutes us by our influence and feedback, control and sense, of our bodies. Our clothes become us when we wear them, without even thinking about it. Our hair doesn't have any feeling to it, not much, but it's still us, if less us than something we can totally feel and control.

Of course, we are not one life-form but a collection of cells and bacteria, each a life-form in itself performing a task and co-operating with its neighbours with differing degrees of dependence and independence. Do you think that our cells are aware of us? That any individual cell knows that it forms one big being with an independent self-awareness?

We don't command our cells directly, for the notion of us itself, a control centre, is illusory, a factor that emerges from the interactions of the cells. Like a living city, cells are partly independent, and partly responsive to their neighbours, the rules, chemicals and signals from those "higher up" in the control chain. Our bodies function like a country, a world in itself with the commanding brain cells as government, capable of some wilful doctrine or law, but largely independent of the lives of the populace. The cells of our bodies live perfectly well when we are unconscious, after all. But we can't do as much when unconscious. Together we are stronger, just as one cell alone can't achieve most of what one human can. No cell will ever play the piano, never mind compose a Bach fugue, but a collection of them can and did!

Our society functions in a similar way too. We interact and socialise depending on rules and needs, interactions. Together we achieve more than we could alone. Nobody invented the electronic computer, or put a man into space; those things were collective efforts. Many activities of society are now essentially collective, with no one person capable of doing them. This applies even to vital public services. The individual has grown less and less important as civilisation has advanced.

We respond to rules as complex as those that our cells respond to. We purge the world of vermin in the same way that cells attack bacteria. Societies go to war when threatened, like an attacked body battles an infection. Our memory is made up from the collective memories of our brain cells, but so to does society form and store memories in libraries and archives, memories greater than any one person can have. Could it be that we form a new being, one collective consciousness with a united independent thought, as detached from us as one cell is from our minds? This poses a question; what is the difference between our waking conscious selves and when we are asleep and unconscious?

On a cellular level there is probably no difference. When awake we can move about though, talk, and interact, and do things... that's the key difference between being conscious and unconscious! How can a society, a country, a planet, express that it is self-aware? And to whom? Without an entity for our society to interact with then perhaps it can't be called conscious. Perhaps we seek life on other planets because the great being that is all life on Earth feels alone.

Mash

Tick tick. SO many things in progress at the moment. My main art task is the construction of the Eden cabinet, a new art project that has already pushed the boundaries of doing something intensive and expensive that 99.99% of other artists wouldn't bother with!

However last night I went to the première of a short promotional video that I wrote the music for, so here it is. It's for a charity ball in Nantwich in November, so if you know anyone in the vicinity who'd like to come then please let them know and/or spread the video. I hope you enjoy it.

Tick Tick

SO much to report, I've barely got time to stop and breathe. These days are busy. I'm working now on three cabinet type artworks, the first The Monstrance Of Life is the simplest...

It's an oak cabinet with nine paintings inside that will be wall or floor standing. The work is about joy and life and contentment, almost like Beethoven's 6th Symphony in art. The idea came to me while watching a quiet Swedish film and a moment of happiness and perfect contentment. Unlike much of my work it's quite simple, no deep symbolic meaning, and more in the Brahms tradition than my Wagnerian romanticism. The general look and feel with be light wood and gold.

The second work is a sister work called The Monstrance of Death, a darker mirror. Little is done yet.

And finally Eden, another circular cabinet work about environmental destruction which is unrelated to the other two. This is an ambitious engineering project that will be a suitable challenge, a large wall mounted work that will look like the sun and open to reveal a detailed painting.

But calloo! callay! My next days are full of the daily patter and rush of tidal forces, pushing me onwards, through the barrage of life!

Tomorrow: Friday 12th July: I'm setting up Masquerade and Celebrating The Diversity, the annual exhibition at The Cubby Hole in Crewe. The night will conclude with a masked ball. Here is my mask:

Saturday 13th July: I'm promoting the Art Up Close group on Nantwich square.

14th: To the R.B.S.A. Gallery in Birmingham with me to deliver one of my newest works, Love is Dead, to their Portrait Prize competition.

Monday: To Warrington and delivery of An Octopus Finally Killing A Lighthouse Which Is Assumpted Into An Angel to the Python arts festival, a major event spanning four galleries across the North of England.

Tuesday: A planned trip to the Visual Arts Cheshire Gallery in Northwich to meet the team there.

And then Wednesday and I can continue working on art for a short short SHORT few days. Oh for more time to make art. But soon, the summer will end and I'll stop visual art and the strains and strings on music will enforce themself upon me once more, for I can't wait to write my Death Symphony, which changes in my mind with each consideration, but now must be like Beethoven's Ninth in reverse, for it is now the symphony that is dead. I want Mark Elder to conduct it. Musically I'm listening to Bruckner for the first time, and Berlioz' Requiem. I rather like Berlioz. My next plan is to listen to more Elgar, who I suspect is much better than I suspected.

Olé!

Waiting

My clock design 'Waiting' is finished. The ropes were a tad bent and limp at first. I used brass wire, but no matter how taut you stretch it it'll still be the wrong length! Something stretchy was needed so I solved the problem by using elastic. here's the finished clock.

Elastic will probably rot over time, so it was also important to make the chains replaceable, if needed, so these hoops were embedded into the clock and the ropes tied to them.

I glued a tiny chain link onto the hoops that go around the gold plated man.

Human Powered Engine

Second Oomazing tee-shirt design...

Oomazing

Well, last weekend a friend said that I should try some tee-shirt designs, so a week later and I've got some. I instantly thought of flat bright screen-prints like I used to wear about 30 years ago, and actually I rather enjoyed coming up with a range. I decided to include text only reluctantly because I wanted something that even people who didn't speak English could enjoy, but found it did improve the message and that the text augmented the image without being necessary to understand it.

Here's the first design:

It's on sale on RedBubble.

This is so different from my normal art that I decided to use a new brand name, so thought up "Oomazing". I decided to add the Oomazing text to each design too; that was a close decision because a logo can detract from a design, and its tiny details might not print brilliantly, but the logo is attractive and these designs are quite simple so a brand that provides consistent quality will improve their value, and it makes it easier to see and remember who made the design and where to get more like it.

I will release new ones over the coming days/weeks. Who knows if/how they'll be popular, but I hope people like wearing them as much as I enjoyed designing them.

Life and the Attenuation of Information Loss

I've been thinking about information for some time, the philosophy behind information storage and existence, why the idea that entropy always increases with time seems at odds with life's ability to get better at storing and processing information. Well I had a thought last night that its because life exists exactly because its good at preserving information so I thought I'd write it down for posterity, in case some distant philosopher of the future finds it useful and stumbles upon it, so here it is.

Over time information is lost. At best information can be retained as it is copied, but never improved. Over time errors or disruption are inevitable, and each error will degrade the information, eventually destroying it. A vinyl record will accumulate scratches, a whisper will be remembered slightly differently, a rock carved with letters will be subject to the rain, the dust, sun, degradation, but lost information cannot be restored; the letters on a rotted gravestone could be carved again, but never to a state beyond their original state, even if the words were restored the character of the lines and so some information about the original carving would be lost, malformed. Information loss is inevitable.

This applies to all things, even the universe itself. The true end of the universe will be at the point of information death, when all things have deteriorated to a point where none of the information present in the universe survives or can be recovered; a state of even "greyness", a random and inherently unpredictable babble that can neither store nor contain any information.

It appears though that life seems to defy this, that over time civilisation has grown to find more secure ways to store and retain information, from stone age speech, to written words, to the digital age we seem to be more adept than ever at preserving information in better ways. Why is this? And what is life, what is it's purpose and why did it evolve at all?

Although information will degrade over time, the universe can occasionally stumble across ways to preserve information, to attenuate its loss. A liquid river bed can preserve the shape of a dead animal, a fossil, like a plaster cast memory of the shape of the animal. In that way the river bed has acted to preserve some information about the animal. A crater on the moon has preserved some information about the asteroid that created it. There are other events in the universe that are not preserved; an asteroid might have fallen into a black hole and been lost and forgotten, and all of the information about the asteroid would be lost. However, just as loss of information is inevitable, it's also inevitable that systems able to preserve information will survive in a way that systems that aren't able to preserve information cannot. The moon crater might persist or might not, but once a system that destroys information, like the black hole, is unable to preserve information it can never again gain the ability to preserve information. That fact acts as a selector, and the selector acts as a driving force of evolution; the universe evolves systems that are able to preserve information, preferring systems that best attenuate information loss.

Life can store information, recording aspects of its environment in its behaviour and its structure, and later its memory, through genetic memory across generations. Advanced life uses sounds to communicate, and memory to preserve and transmit information, and humans have evolved to be able to study the external universe, note it and record information about it, and write, and store information digitally. I postulate that life exists principally to attenuate information loss, and that life came into existence because the universe naturally prefers systems that best slow down the loss of information.

Let's go further. As humans we are curious about the universe, and like to remember things, make notes and communicate. These all help prevent information loss. All life has those properties, and all life stores, records and communicates information better than non-living systems.

Even within societies and nature this can be said to be true. Communication is the transmission of information from one system to another, and this evolved between cells and animals, becoming more sophisticated over time. The ability to detect aspects of the world, sight; then in humans, intelligence, mathematics, writing and technology, all of these things give us a greater ability to detect and preserve information. The ability to obtain, communicate and preserve information is the principle marker of evolution from the earliest life to now, and now our civilisation is more able to obtain and store information than any system ever discovered in the universe.

Enlightenment

In Buddhism emotional pain is caused by wanting something. Desire can be controlled, and therefore pain can be mitigated by the cancellation of want. Even Buddha failed in this respect because after his "enlightenment" he decided not to kill himself because he wanted to tell others about his findings. It's not possible to want nothing except by dying. As dying is non-existence then the existence of want should be accepted. All you have to decide is what you want.

Control over your wants and discipline over yourself is more important that not wanting. Wanting might cause frustration and pain, but knowing what you want is the important thing, with the acknowledgement that you might not ever get it. This is enlightenment.